BIRMINGHAM, Ala (WIAT) – New ways to back up your important family photos, a possible delay in the new iPhone release, and the impressive power *you* have with social media to make things happen! David Powell has it all in Tech Tuesday!
The following is David’s description of today’s 3 topics:
This week, we explore two topics and tell a story about the power of social media.

* Amazon Cloud Drive Photos- we have mentioned many times the importance of backing up our photos to the cloud. Now that we use our smartphones as our primary “snapshot” camera, it is important that we get those photos off of our phone and somewhere else. Last week, Amazon announced a photo component to their cloud drive. They already offer data storage in the cloud for people with Amazon accounts. Now, they have a tool that mimics Apple’s own Photostream service. You can download the app to your iPhone or Android device and it will automatically upload any pictures you take on your phone to the cloud. The Apple service will hold 1000 photos for 30 days. The Amazon service, which is 5GB, will hold 2000 photos with no expiration. (It should be noted that Photo Stream does not count against your 5GB iCloud storage allotment.) This service from Amazon is free with additional storage available at minimal cost–$10 per year for 20GB. Which is a ton of storage at a low price.
* Apple iPhone 5S delay? The rumors have been swirling that the iPhone 5S is coming out in either June or July. In fact, I’m upgrade eligible in July and will likely wait to upgrade until the 5S becomes available. However, some industry insiders recently visited some of the manufacturing plants in China and report that there are some pre-production problems that may delay shipping dates. If these problems delay the release of the 5S, it will likely have a snowball effect and slow the release of the refreshed iPad Mini and regular iPads. So, if you were waiting to upgrade your phone till this summer to get the 5S, your wait may go into football season.
* The Power of Social Media- last week, I traveled out of the country. One of the airlines messed up our flights and essentially stranded us in NYC for a day. I began hammering them on Twitter for their lack of customer service and support. One of the guys traveling with me finally got the airline to call him on his cell. When they spoke to him, they said “is David Powell with you?” He told them “yes”. They said, “can you ask him to stop tweeting, we are now trying to help.” It is sad that it took what amounted to a social media public shaming to get a response, but it does illustrate the power of social media. For our viewers that travel frequently, you may want to go ahead and follow the airlines that you travel frequently and tweet them when you have a problem. We’d love for the airlines to provide quality service without needing a push, but social media can give you some power to maybe get a quicker response!